Friday, September 29, 2006

Being somewhat familiar with YouTube, I decided to explore other user-created video sites on the Internet. I was surprised by how many I found.

[Note:]Sites with * require you to watch ads before your video plays.

Many choices for browsingFor browsing, I still prefer YouTube, but I also like Veoh and DailyMotion. Like almost all video sites, clips play directly on these webpages.

Yahoo! Video and Google Video make browsing easy, although clips from Yahoo! Video sometimes open in a seperate player window, usually either Windows Media Player or Real Player, instead of playing directly on the site. AOL Video offers paid selections as well as user-contributed clips (as does Google Video). I also liked Atom Films*, an old-school viral video site that I hadn't visited in years.

GoFish was typical except for the annoying America's Dream Date clips that start playing as soon as you get to the site. Metacafe and ifilm* were also rather typical. A lot (but not all) of what's on view at MySpace is almost pornographic and generally NSFW (not safe for work).

Not your average video sitesRevver is a little different than most; they say they are "the first viral video network that pays." Each video has an ad at the end of it; each time a viewer clicks the ad, the video poster gets paid. YouAreTV has interesting and different clips; they say they offer "the best independent films, shows, and videos online," and it's true that the videos weren't your typical offerings but tended to be more serious. DailyMotion offers more international clips (like these from France) than other sites.

Blinkx for searchingWith so many video clip websites around, a search service like blinkx.tv is invaluable; blinkx searches even more video sites than I had already located. I ran my infamous fainting goats search, and blinkx found 25 videos from a wide variety of sources.

Favorite clipsMonty Python and the Holy Grail, told in Legos, from Veoh

Still Weathering the Storm, a Hurricane Katrina documentary by a group of kids, from YouAreTV